04.18.11

Summary: The US patent system preys on Canadians as Microsoft’s infringement goes to SCOTUS and RIM wants a patent shield shortly after Microsoft’s patent troll, Nathan Myhrvold (the company’s extortion arm), put a tax on every BlackBerry; Apple too goes trigger-happy against Linux, having given investment money to this same patent troll

Today is the day scheduled for oral argument before the US Supreme Court in the appeal of the i4i v. Microsoft patent litigation. The appeal is focused on an issue that matters to FOSS a great deal. EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Apache Foundation have filed an amicus brief [PDF] that explains to the court why it matters so much and with such particularity to the FOSS community. I’ve done it as text for you.

I’ll let them explain the details, but the big picture is that US patent law, largely due to the Federal Circuit’s broadening of plaintiffs’ rights, is hard on defendants and harder still on FOSS defendants, because FOSS uses a development model that doesn’t match the patent law as currently interpreted by the Federal Circuit.

The issue before the US Supreme Court is this, in plain English: how hard should it be to prove that a patent that the USPTO has issued is invalid? How about if you have evidence that the USPTO examiner never looked at? Should juries assume that the USPTO got it right? I smile just writing that. With FOSS software, it’s almost impossible for an examiner to find prior art, unless it’s been patented, which it almost never is, given the restrictions on what examiners can search through. And you may be surprised when you read what the courts require as proof. I am pretty sure that after you read this brief, you’ll see how unbalanced the current system is, how it disadvantages FOSS defendants, and hopefully you’ll notice some things you can do to help balance out the playing field. I hope the court sees the unfairness too, and I hope they care.

The bottom line for me remains that software and patents need to get a divorce. But anything that we or the courts or Congress can do to ameliorate the strange and damaging tilt toward patent plaintiffs to the detriment of defendants is to the good. The law is supposed to be fair to both plaintiffs and defendants, but with patent law, it absolutely isn’t, as the brief will show you. The damage being done to innovation is enormous already, and with Microsoft on a march to rape and pillage FOSS and force the community — most especially Android — to pay royalties for patents that could be invalidated in a more fair system but which it can use as anticompetitive weapons unless something is done to shortcircuit their strategy, this case is vitally important.

A software patent case in which Microsoft was accused of wilfully infringing a patent on XML – and forced to suspend sales of Word and Office – reaches the US Supreme Court on Monday afternoon UK time and could have a wide-ranging effect on future litigation.

How long can Microsoft pretend that software patents which are asserted against Microsoft are invalid whereas those which is uses to extort others are valid? In some cases, as in the VirnetX case for example, Microsoft must pay a lot of money to a company which according to this new report “does not currently have any sources of revenue from operations.”

Here is a new pinion piece by Doug Lichtman (at the New York Times). It implies rather than states that the patent office has been subverted by leeches like Intellectual Ventures. To quote: [via Groklaw]

ON Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise unremarkable patent dispute, the Court has promised to decide the degree to which juries should be allowed to question whether a patent should have been issued at all.

It’s a critical issue: the current approach, under which juries are explicitly discouraged from questioning a patent’s validity, all too often means that dubious patents are nevertheless enforced. That inhibits innovation, the very thing that patent law is supposed to encourage.

[...]

These problems could in theory be fixed with more money. But resources aren’t the only issue. The extent and quality of Patent Office review is also limited by the fact that the process is not adversarial. Indeed, the only parties involved in Patent Office review are the applicant and the applicant’s lawyers — people with an obvious incentive to see the application move forward. Contrast that with litigation, where patent plaintiffs have to square off against very motivated patent defendants.

The last bit there is important. it validates calls to abolish the patent office or reboot it such that it actually serves the public and not the lobbyists of Bill Gates and his buddy Nathan Myhrvold. Microsoft does not want software patents to go away because people up there at the top of Microsoft are still cashing in, at the expense of everyone else. That’s what patents are for, they are simply a monopolist’s dream. Apple is no better in that regard, e.g. with its latest anti-Linux patent lawsuit. Boycott Apple, the expensive imitators. █

Summary: Another source names MEP Lehne for his inexcusable monetary interests in an area on which he lobbies and affects legislation (patents)

MR. Lehne is one of those controversial figures among the FFII crowd; he is one who lobbies aggressively for laws that harm Europe and benefit his own monetary interests. It’s that type of people who should never have entered parliament and the president of the FFII found a Twitterer quoting the following new report:

Lessons from the #EU cash-for-influence scandal: block MEPs from taking second jobs with conflicts of interest http://bit.ly/hZlqJb

The cash-for-influence scandal has unleashed, perhaps for the first time ever, a broad debate about the relations between MEPs and industry lobbyists. It has also sparked an important process of drafting stricter ethics and transparency rules for the European Parliament. A working group of ten MEPs led by Parliament President Buzek meets for the first time this week, with the task to present detailed proposals before the summer break. In the wake of the cash-for-influence scandal it is hard to find any MEPs that openly question the need for stricter rules. But it is a public secret that there is a significant number of MEPs that oppose effective rules. There’s reason to fear that at least some of the MEPs in the new working group might belong to this category of low-profile opponents to change.

Klaus Heiner Lehne is working 1 day/week for Taylor Wessing, active in EU lobbying and pushing for software patents http://ur1.ca/3vtvf

And from the article: “There are at the moment no rules to stop MEPs having other jobs – and many MEPs do. Influential conservative MEP Klaus Heiner Lehne, to mention one example, is a partner at law firm Taylor Wessing, where he continues to work one day per week. Taylor Wessing is active in EU lobbying, on issues ranging from software patents to private equity regulation.” Microsoft Florian already jumps to his defence. How revealing. █

Summary: Another black eye for Microsoft, courtesy of white-hat hackers; Windows gets punctured on the server side just like on the desktop side

MANY of the world’s servers, Web servers in particular, run GNU/Linux. Many of them are not being counted because Microsoft-funded trackers like IDC’s only count revenue, not real market share. CentOS never gets counted even though it is claimed to be the most widely used operating system for servers, at least among the GNU/Linux bunch (it runs Techrights too).

Here we have a reminder from the news, teaching anyone who is still sitting on the fence why Microsoft on servers is a dangerous gamble: [via]

Whitehats pierce giant hole in Microsoft security shield

In late December, Microsoft researchers responding to publicly posted attack code that exploited a vulnerability in the FTP service of IIS told users it wasn’t much of a threat because the worst it probably could do was crash the application.

Meanwhile, in some of the latest MSBBC articles, they fail to mention that the security problems they write about only affect Microsoft Windows. Here is one new example and another that says: “Alexander Gostev, of Kaspersky Labs, told Moscow Echo radio the attack was coming from thousands of infected computers from China, the US and Western Europe.” Well, “infected Windows” is what it ought to say, not “infected computers” as the computers themselves have nothing to do with the defective code that’s electronically or magnetically on disk.

Thank you, Microsoft, for continuing to show why GNU/Linux is the better choice. █

Server

Computing is an invaluable resource for advancement of scientific breakthroughs. Today we’re announcing an academic research grant program called Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty, which provides 1 billion hours of computational core capacity to researchers. That’s orders of magnitude larger than the computational resources most scientists normally have access to.

Kernel Space

It was also to Linux’s advantage that its license, the Gnu General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) made it possible both to share the efforts of many programmers without letting their work disappear into proprietary projects. That, as I see it, was one of the problems with the BSD Unix family–FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.–and its BSD License.

When running the Warsow game at 1920 x 1080, its frame-rate is slightly up from the first Lion developer preview and Mac OS X 10.6.6, while the NVIDIA blob on Ubuntu 10.10 was the slowest of the bunch. Of course, if using the open-source Nouveau driver on Gallium3D its performance would even be worse for Linux.

Applications

The number of files stored on the average desktop PC keeps increasing. Our needs change as we do, and every year we depend more on digital documents while our storage devices get bigger to keep pace. In short, the way we proudly arranged our files just a few years ago has become obsolete.

The upshot is that you not only need an efficient assistant for the common task of dealing with your files, but also a workhorse for the next time you want to do some serious cleaning.

Games

So today I had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Bok of The Zod Engine via google talk. This is the most fun I’ve had chatting to developer so far (mainly because it was live and not via email, not to say the others haven’t been awesome).

[...]

MB: Knowing linux and c/c++ has been a great combination for me and I recommend it for any aspiring computer scientists. Also I do feel that it is very important to make more games available for linux.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

Trinity KDE is mostly nostalgia. While KDE3 had its merits, with the latest version of KDE4, it’s really hard to argue against the technological and ergonomic advancement introduced into the desktop environment.

One of the results of the UX sprint in Berlin which I’m really happy with is that it helped me frame some of the bigger ideas behind in my mind behind Plasma Active, and make it digestable for someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time yet thinking about it, and digesting these ideas.

The Marble Team has just released Marble 1.1. This release is special! With many new features being developed during Google Code-in, the Marble Team decided to get it out between the usual KDE application releases. The new version provides several new features and improvements…

GNOME Desktop

This is the team that set the general plan for the GNOME 3 release and I feel very proud of having been part of it. I especially remember a couple of very long conversations with my evil twin about GNOME 3 and the team discussions during our meetings at GUADEC and FOSDEM…

Leaving the release team means that I now have no official roles in GNOME anymore. I’ve left a few other positions recently—among others that I haven’t really announced. This is actually an explicit decision of mine to gradually free some of my (rare) spare time for other personal projects. You probably know one of them. But there’s probably more coming, stay tuned!

Writing on his blog, Zeitgeist developer Stefano Candori has shown off the beginnings of a feature addition to the semantic-tracking engine which allows users to specify what Zeitgeist can log – and what it shouldn’t.

Some people think that GNU/Linux is only one Operating System. Others think that “Linux” is the only UNIX Operating System derivative but BSD must not be forgotten. Both GNU/Linux and BSD include a lot of different OSs in their respective families. While Linux has Tux (a penguin) as its mascot, BSD has Daemon (a little devil). Interestingly, many of the OSs in both families are identified by logos representing animals. Thus, I made this little zoo with the logos of as many distros as I could find to illustrate the great variety of Operating Systems available to choose.

After a full week of usage, I can’t say that Puppy Linux 5.2.5 Lucid is quite ready to compete with industrial-strength distros such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or openSUSE. It does come very close and I was able to get most of my work done, but the collection of PET packages is still insufficient to meet my heavy demands. The addition of the Ubuntu repository is potentially a solution, but the package collection is far from complete, and the issue of “dependency hell” is a source of frustration.

Furthermore, the wisdom of running as root continues to haunt Puppy. In this era of online shopping and online banking, users expect ironclad security, and it should not require command-line hacks to get it. Discussion of this issue often gets heated, even rabid, turning into an all-consuming flamefest at times. I wish people wouldn’t get so emotional about it, but it is what it is. I don’t expect the raging debate to end any time soon.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. Is Puppy meant to be blockbuster OS, built to withstand attacks like a server farm? Or is it just a lightweight fun OS that we can use to revive old hardware, or run from a USB stick when we need portability? A lot of people like Puppy – it’s in the top 10 of the DistroWatch page-hit ranking. I enjoy Puppy too, and it’s what I run exclusively on my netbook. Maybe the only thing wrong with Puppy is that users’ expectations tend to exceed the developer’s intentions.

Red Hat Family

I confess that when I read some weeks back about the state’s giving Raleigh-based Red Hat almost $17 million in incentives not to move, I was predictably agitated. After all, for over 15 years as a judge, candidate and lawyer, I have criticized and opposed this type of corporate welfare. My change of heart when it comes to Red Hat has nothing to do with our governor’s donning a red fedora set at a jaunty angle to announce the giveaway. Nor do I own any Red Hat stock. It’s really all about the fact that local businesses have finally figured out how the game is played.

Fedora

One of the other “big names” in the Linux world is Red Hat’s community driven Fedora. Beyond Fedora itself, there are also a small number of derivatives out there based off of this Yum+RPM powered distribution. The following is a round up of some of the better ones.

Debian Family

Canonical/Ubuntu

I liked Meerkat, in fact I loved it. But, its existence in my life has reduced to a couple of DVDs which are laying in some dark corners of the drawers of my office desk. They will never be put in CD drives again, they will never be used to install anything again. They might remain there as memories or be thrown in trash to be taken care by Brussels waste management department.

This blog posting is strictly my opinion of the two interfaces in Ubuntu 11.04.

I tried both of these interfaces when that I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2. Unity did not stay installed very long. This interface has matured to a stable state however the interface did not appeal to me. Unity is plagued with overly large icons and lots of blandly bright colors. It’s like the screen was designed by Crayola and not Canonical.

Flavours and Variants

Phones

Android

In yet another sign Intel is moving quickly into Android, its embedded Linux software subsidiary Wind River launched a new mobile technology development center in Stockholm focused on Android. Meanwhile, the Intel-backed MeeGo project appears to be gaining some new life for its handset development, with LG Electronics, ZTE, and China Mobile filling the gap left by Nokia, says an industry report.

Wind River’s addition of an engineering team in Stockholm, Sweden, represents its “concentrated effort to grow its Android expertise for a wider range of Android-based devices including tablets, media phones and other device classes,” says the

The forum discussion surrounding TransGaming’s GameTree Linux and Cedega Technology continues, with some Linux gamers regretting that they ever even supported TransGaming. One user also brings up the past from when — back in 2000~2001 — TransGaming had pledged to open up their code-base once they reached 20,000 subscribers. They believed in an open-source philosophy at that time, but they never ended up opening up their code once hitting that milestone. Even though Cedega as we know it is now dead, this former fork of the X11-licensed Wine is still closed.

With FLOSS, the licence usually costs $0 so business running on FLOSS could save all of that $12billion and it would only take a small effort to migrate to FLOSS. Business has made mistakes along the way by not migrating sooner and buying licences instead of making their own software but it is never too late and $12billion annually saved forever will pay the total cost of migration in a few months or years, leaving all of eternity to spend the money on other things that bring value.

The reason is clear: Open source licenses are designed to allow users to revise, fix, and extend their code. The barber or cop may not be familiar enough with code to contribute, but programmers sure know how to fiddle with their tools.

April 15 brought some interesting developments in the office suite front. Oracle’s press release announcing its intention of halting commercial interest in OpenOffice.org came hours before The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1.

[...]

LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1 received lots of bug fixes and a few new additions. Some include:

Programming

The Supreme Court took up a case involving ownership of computer technology in this 1996 case.

Lotus Development Corporation copyrighted a computer spreadsheet program called “Lotus 1-2-3.” Borland International, a competing software company, released a similar program called “Quattro,” that contained a program called “key reader.”

On Tuesday I held an exciting meeting with a dozen high-flying young Europeans involved in science, start ups, government and civil society, whose insights are can really help us with the Digital Agenda.

I was very impressed with their clear views and with what they’ve achieved using technology in their careers.

Security

A computer programmer who once volunteered for Perverted Justice, the producers of “To Catch a Predator,” was sentenced Friday to two years in prison for launching a botnet that attacked the organization’s web site.

Censorship

Yesterday, YouTube redesigned its copyright help center to help educate its users about the ins and outs of copyright law. Copyright law can be complicated and, in light of that, the site now sends offenders to the YouTube Copyright School where they can watch explanatory cartoons in an experience that our own Audrey Watters isn’t too sure arrives at education.

If you agree, then you might want to get in on YouTube’s next effort – a Q&A with legal experts it will be holding on the video site at the beginning of May.

Fair use, YouTube explains, “is a legal term that grants creators an exception to the strict copyright that the original content owner controls — in layman’s terms, it’s the idea that as long as the use is ‘fair,’ someone can reference part of someone else’s work for parody, scholarly reasons, or more.”

Privacy

Julee Morrison has been obsessed with Bon Jovi since she was a teenager.

So when paid ads for fan sites started popping up on the 41-year-old Salt Lake City blogger’s Facebook page, she was thrilled. She described herself as a “clicking fool,” perusing videos and photos of the New Jersey rockers.

Then it dawned on Morrison why all those Bon Jovi ads appeared every time she logged on to the social networking site.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

The professional shakedown artists otherwise known as Canada’s cultural industries — telecoms, broadcasters, TV networks, filmmakers — are gearing up for another operatic hit on Canadians. They want the Internet controlled through new rules and new charges that would expand their existing protection racket that now funnels billions into their hands and limits the freedom of Canadians.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

In theory, those engaged online would be the most concerned by an iPod tax. It’s an unproven theory since I can’t say for sure the folks contributing to election chatter on Twitter are also the most likely to have iPods or be affected by the controversial (and possibly non-existent) iPod tax. However, since it’ll make this post more interesting, I’m going to make the assumption Tweeters are also most likely to be worked up into a frenzy (cue ass-u-me jokes now). Let’s call this campaign a safe bet with an expectation of a good ROI.

Summary: As Windows sales continue to decline Microsoft pulls the plug (in some sense) on Vista and advocacy of the latest phones platform comes to a halt

“Vista” is a disallowed term in Microsoft’s marketing department, probably just like the KIN (and this is why we overuse the term). These are total embarrassments and Microsoft is now promoting Vista 7 and Vista Phony 7 instead. But there are clues in this news about Windows Vista support, suggesting of course that even Microsoft gives up on the operating system: [via]

SOFTWARE FLOGGER Microsoft has let slip that Windows Vista users won’t be able to run its upcoming Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) web browser.

This is what customers get for complying with Microsoft’s requests to upgrade to Vista, the best operating system ever (if Microsoft’s marketers are to be believed). What a total embarrassment. They lied. E-mails which were unsealed later on revealed that even Microsoft managers knew Vista was a disaster, well before it was released. But they deceived the public repeatedly and harmed customers. So now they need to purchase (and pay for) the bugfix version of Vista, called Vista 7. And what about Vista Phony 7? Those who bought Windows Mobile not too long ago or even developed for it are totally screwed. Microsoft abandons them just like KIN users and Tim explains that even the Microsoft “diehards” cannot defend Vista Phony 7:

There’s no real news on the Windows Phone 7 front, however WP7 does have particular interest with me. After the Kin debacle the “successes” of the Windows Phone 7 and the strategy with which Microsoft is trying to market it make for fascinating viewing. Just like the Kin, we are seeing plenty of attempts by “advocates” to champion the device, but we all know how the Kin turned out, don’t we?

I am still trying desperately to find anyone I know in my circle of friends who actually has one of these devices, but so far the quest has been akin (no pun intended) to that of looking for the Holy Grail.

Some of Microsoft’s marketers insisted that KIN, just like Vista, was just so wonderful. They lies through their teeth. It remains to be seen just how many of the other products also turn out to be a total disaster. Windows sales, for example, keep declining, which means that Vista 7 is not exactly a success. Far from it. Maybe it was a marketing success as we pointed out in last night's show/episode of TechBytes. And speaking of which, Tim is collecting questions to help remove FUD about Techrights and yours truly. It was his idea to do this and he wrote:

I extend the offer to anyone, if you don’t want to post the questions here, then please feel free to email or use any of my contact points. I will let this offer run for about 2 weeks before putting them to him on an audiocast which will hopefully be hosted at a neutral venue.

Over the weekend and just before that, Techrights came under dozens of verbal attacks — including lies — all coming from .NET and Microsoft boosters. This helps us realise that we’re on the right topic and that we are effective. █